Pre-Record: Capture the Seconds Before You Pressed the Button (Pro)

The problem

The best moments are unannounced: your pet does the thing, a kid takes a first step, a crowd reacts. By the time you’ve unlocked the phone and tapped record, it’s over. The classic fix is to start recording early and record for ages, which fills your phone and leaves you trimming long clips.

What Pre-Record does

You arm it on the camera screen. While armed, DualCam composes frames and keeps the last 10, 30 or 60 seconds in a rolling buffer. When you tap record, the buffer is written to the start of the video, so the file begins before you pressed the button, on the same timeline.

To keep it practical, the buffer holds encoded video in short chunks that are discarded as they age out, rather than raw frames.

Steps

1. Choose a layout and quality first. Changing them re-arms the buffer and throws away what was held.
2. Open the Pre-Record section and choose 10s, 30s or 60s.
3. Arm it on the camera screen. The status shows how much is buffered.
4. Tap record when something happens. The saved video includes the seconds before.

What to expect

• The mic stays on while armed. That’s required so the buffered seconds have sound. The recording indicator stays lit and haptics go quiet.
• It costs battery and storage space while armed, since the phone is continuously composing and encoding.
• It stands down automatically after 5 minutes idle, under heat or memory pressure, and when the app is backgrounded. It refuses to arm if storage is too low.
• You may get a little more than you asked for. The buffer starts on a keyframe, so you can get up to about a second extra.
• Pro only.

Use it for

Pets, kids, sports, street scenes, and live reactions: anything that happens before you can react.

FAQ

How far back can it go? 10, 30 or 60 seconds.

Does it record while armed? It buffers continuously on the phone. Nothing is saved until you tap record, and the buffer is then prepended to the recording.

Why is the recording indicator on? The microphone stays on while armed so the buffered seconds have sound, which keeps the indicator lit and quiets haptics.

When does it turn itself off? After 5 idle minutes, when the phone is hot or low on memory, when the app goes to the background, and it won’t arm when storage is short.